Plus Plus from Palantir.net

Join host George DeMet and Palantir team members who will be presenting sessions at DrupalCon Portland:

CEO Tiffany Farriss and Chief of Staff Maggie Lewis discuss Palantir's unique peer coaching and skills-based career advancement system, which aims to reduce bias and give employees more agency over their growth. Transcript available at https://www.palantir.net/podcast/new-framework-career-development-and-growth

George DeMet, Andy Masullo, Ashley Cyborski, Jes Constantine, Malak Desai, Jill Farley, Christina Hu, and jayme johnson discuss using Open Space Technology (OST) at Palantir's recent in-person retreat. Transcript available at: https://www.palantir.net/podcast/using-open-space-technology-our-person-retreat

George DeMet, Patrick Weston, Jack Graham, Oksana Salloum, and Rob DeVita discuss the fast-changing and often bewildering world of generative AI. They talk about some of the ways people are using these tools at home and at work, a few tips on how to use them in a safe and responsible way, and their potential impacts on culture and society.

A pair of conversations with past and present members of the Palantir Fellowship Program. Recipients receive a full scholarship and stipend for the 12 week Drupal Career Online course presented by DrupalEasy. Graduates of the course are then offered a paid internship with Palantir, along with professional mentoring and the opportunity for a full time position. First, you'll hear from Cori Neslund, who interviewed a number of past Fellowship recipients earlier this year. Then you'll hear a conversation George DeMet had recently with current Palantir interns about their career transitions and their experiences working in a remote environment. Transcript available at https://www.palantir.net/podcast/palantir-fellowship-program

Jill Farley, Ken Rickard, and Byron Duvall discuss their experiences with the Cypress front-end testing framework. For a complete transcript, visit https://www.palantir.net/podcast/cypress-testing-framework-conversation

Britany Acre, George DeMet, Jill Farley, Joseph Meersman, Ju Vanderwater, Ken Rickard, Tiffany Farriss, Travis Porchia discuss the sessions they'll be presenting at DrupalCon Pittsburgh, what they're looking forward to at the event, and tips for those who have never been to a DrupalCon. For a complete transcript, visit: https://www.palantir.net/podcast/drupalcon-pittsburgh-preview

Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form (ad-hoc) podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. In this episode, Allison Manley is joined by Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack, and Juan dives into the Drupal world of Latin and Central America. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley: Hi, everyone. Welcome to On the Air With Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to web design and development. I'm Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing manager. Today, my guest is Juan Daniel Flores of Rootstack. Juan spent some time with me a few months back telling me about all the exciting things happening with Drupal in Latin America. Here we are at DrupalCon Baltimore 2017- Juan D. Flores: That's right. AM: ... in the convention center at the corner of Pratt and Charles Street. I am sitting with ... JDF: Juan Flores from Rootstack from Panama. AM: From Panama. You came all the way from Panama. JDF: Yes, sunny, tropical Panama. Yeah. The temperature is quite a good a change for me. AM: Is it? JDF: I was born in Colombia, in Bogota, actually. The temperature is more or less like this. I really miss the cool temperature, because in Panama, sometimes it gets really, really hot. AM: Well, we're welcome to give you a nice, rainy break, so ... JDF: Yeah, I appreciate it. AM: Is this your first Drupal Con? JDF: Yeah, this is my first personal, my first Drupal Con in the States, but we have been attending Drupal Con like, since five years ago. We are three partners, and they do most of the traveling. AM: Okay. Excellent. How long have you been involved in Drupal? JDF: We have been involved with Drupal like from seven years ago right after college. We graduated, and we got our degrees, and we started the company. We started with Drupal right away. We learned about Drupal, actually, by a friend in the college. It was like we saw the tool. We saw all the things that you could do, and we were like hooked up, like, "We have to do this. We have to use this." It's been quite a long time. AM: Wow. That's great. Were you self-taught or ... JDF: Totally self-taught. In the university, they teach you certain things, but to be, to thrive in this world, you really have to be very proficient in learning by yourself. You have to be active. You have to be checking what's going in the world. Thanks to our desire to know more, we picked it up and here we are seven years later. AM: And here you are. Glad to have you. You call yourselves the Drupaleros, sort of jokingly. JDF: Yeah, that's the term we use for Drupal. That's in Spanish. It's a term that we use in general. AM: Universally. JDF: Yeah. Universal. AM: So that's not just the Panamanian- JDF: Exactly. Exactly. AM: Okay. I feel like there's a presentation next year for just the Spanish-speaking Drupaleros. I feel like there's some sort of presentation you should make around that and what's happening in Latin and Central America. JDF: That will be interesting. Even though like I feel that we're a little bit late to the party, in terms of doing stuff, there has been a lot of work that has been done by Latin developers. For example, there's Jesus Olivas, which is ... Well, and the team from We Know It, that they have been working hard with the Drupal console project, which is picking up, really, a great amount of fans. He gave a talk yesterday. He's from Mexico. There's another guy. His name is Omers. He's also from Mexico. The other guys, Anso and Kenya are from Costa Rica. AM: How many would you say there are total between Latin and Central America, you know, that you keep in touch with on a regular basis working in Drupal? JDF: It's hard to tell to know a certain number because, unfortunately, the community there is like a little bit shy. But I can say that, for example, if I can measure events that we have gone to, for example, the DrupalCon in Costa Rica, or the...

Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s January 2017, and this is episode #7. In this episode, Director of Professional Services Ken Rickard is joined by Cathy Theys of BlackMesh. TRANSCRIPT: Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir. A podcast by Palantir.net, where we go in depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It's January 2017, and this is episode number seven. This time my colleague Ken Rickard does the interviewing work for me. Ken was at GovCon in 2016, and was speaking with Cathy Theys, who is the Drupal community liaison at BlackMesh. She's got some fantastic information about how to get started in Drupal. Ken Rickard [KR]: Today we're talking to Cathy Theys. We're at Drupal GovCon, which is a great event here in Washington D.C., Cathy is the Drupal community liaison for BlackMesh. Cathy, is there anything else we should know about you as we get started? Cathy Theys [CT]: Let's see. Right, so Drupal community liaison. I go to a bunch of events for my job. I fix issues in Drupal. I had a long history of dealing with the mentor program. I tend to serve as a contact point when people have questions about how you get things done in the community or there's a tricky situation coming up, they might ask me my opinion on it, how to deal with that. KR: I know you from the Chicago Drupal community. I know I run into you at a lot of events where you're helping onboard new Drupal developers. CT: Mm-hmm. KR: That's one of the things that you're passionate about. CT: Yes. KR: I think that's a really interesting question here at GovCon, we're dealing with a lot of agencies here who are new to Drupal. The keynote we just sat through was about moving the NIH onto Drupal for the first time. They talked about what that was like. I mean what brought you here, to GovCon specifically? CT: BlackMesh, we're based in Ashburn, Virginia, so we're super close by, local. There's a bunch of us here, there's like eight or nine of us here, so it's really great because I travel a lot. I don't get to see my coworkers all the time, so I go to an event like this, we all get to hang out together and that's really nice. The sessions here are pretty top-notch. There's a lot of interesting topics, both for developers and for agencies. There's a really good range of beginner to advanced ones. It's really great. KR: And I learned yesterday that I think this is officially the biggest non Drupal Con event in the United States. CT: Wow. KR: Yeah. We surpassed [inaudible 00:02:32] bad camps, so that's good. I want to go back to again your role in the communities to help onboard new developers. CT: Mm-hmm (affirmative). KR: In particular, you're a liaison to make it easier for folks to work with Drupal. Like I said, in the keynote, we were dealing with an agency coming on to Drupal for the first time. I think my first question really is, for a government agency or other organizations using Drupal for the first time, what advice do you have for them getting started? CT: The very, very first thing, I think is important is that the agency makes sure that they have an organizational node on Drupal.org. That's just a piece of content where you can put your logo and your company description. It just allows a way of referring to yourself within the Drupal community. Drupal.org is really important for the Drupal community. It's the hub of everything and it's our central conical repository for asking questions and getting answers. So just establishing your agency is the very first thing. Then I think the next thing that's important to do, is to take anybody associated with that agency that might every touch Drupal and make sure they have user accounts. The profiles on these user accounts can be quite...

With the advancement of technology, there are infinite ways and opportunities to work remotely, no matter where you are. In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, we share some strategies for making remote work - well, work. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing Manager here, and today’s advice comes from Scott DiPerna and Lauren Byrwa. In this global economy, there are infinite ways and opportunities to work remotely, no matter where you are. Scott and Lauren are going to share some strategies on how to collaborate successfully across great distances and time zones. Scott DiPerna [SD]: Hi, I’m Scott DiPerna. Lauren Byrwa [LB]: Hi, I’m Lauren Byrwa. SD: Recently we worked with a client in California who had hired a content strategy team in New York City. Lauren, with our development team, was in Chicago, and I, as the Project Manager, was in South Africa. We had lots of interesting new challenges in this project, and like we do in most projects, we learned a lot about working well with our clients, our collaborators, and with each other. LB: So, Scott, what was it like trying to work from South Africa, being seven to nine hours ahead of everyone else? SD: Well, it wasn’t that different from working remotely in Richmond, Virginia. I do shift my working hours to the evening to overlap with the team in the States. But just as I did in Virginia, we do all of our meetings on a video chat regardless of where we are. It’s part of our process especially with our clients being all over the country, so that part wasn’t really different. But we did do a few things differently in this project — not so much because we were all in different places, but because we had multiple vendors and teams collaborating together. Do you want to talk about some of the adjustments that we made in terms of meetings? LB: Yeah, so we met with the content strategy team weekly. We met with our product owner three times a week. We met with our full team, our full team of stakeholders, weekly. And in addition to that we still had all our usual agile ceremonies like scrum, demos, retrospectives, that we always do on projects. These meetings especially were productive because we had all of the strategic functionality up front, and we could ask specific implementation-level questions early on, and we could vet them both with the product owner specifically, with the strategists specifically, and with the entire group. But I think there are a few other ways that the thorough strategy helped. Do you want to talk about those? SD: Sure. I think there were two parts specifically that were really helpful. Doing a lot of the strategic planning up front meant that the client was a lot more conversant in the details of the product that we were planning to build for them. We just had a lot more conversations with them up-front and could talk in detail. The other piece was having much of the functionality visually documented in wireframes that the strategy team kept current with changes in the functionality meant that the client always had a “picture” in their minds of what it was that we were talking about. When everyone is working remotely from one another, these kinds of visuals help conversations over video chat be infinitely more productive, which I think is something we see in all of our projects. So all of this planning had a really helpful impact on your ability to estimate the work up front, too. Do you want to talk a bit about that? LB: Because we had the complete and canonical wireframes from the strategists we were able to fairly precisely estimate all of the functionality that they had scoped out in those wireframes. This meant that even before we started development, we were able to work with our product owner to go over in detail the scope of work we anticipated to be...

Director of Operations Colleen Carroll reveals some of her favorite collaboration tools in this week’s episode of the Secret Sauce. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello, and welcome to the Secret Sauce, brought to you by Palantir.net. This is a short podcast in which we offer a quick tip on some small thing you can do to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, Sales and Marketing Manager at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from our Director of Operations Colleen Carroll, who talks about how the right collaboration tools can make everyone’s workday go a whole lot smoother. Colleen Carroll [CC]: Hi, my name is Colleen, and I’m here today to talk about collaboration tools that we use here at Palantir. We use many different tools here at Palantir, but the ones that I’m going to be focusing on the most are the ones that are basic to being a Palantiri — the tools that we use to communicate and collaborate effectively as a remote-first culture. Some of the tools that are pretty essential to being a Palantiri are really the Google suite. And by that I mean that we use email, through Gmail of course. And that works, that allows us to communicate with each other. But it’s really all the other things that come with the Google apps domain. We use Google Docs for everything. We don’t have Microsoft Office or anything really installed on the computer. We rely on the cloud, we rely on Google Docs in the cloud, to hop in a document together, to draft a note together, to put draft agendas together or to take minutes together. We also use Google spreadsheets and Google presentations. If we can’t get in a document and look at it together, it’s almost as though we’re missing a critical function. We’ve been using the Google suite for many years now. One of the other critical parts of the Google suite that we use is Hangouts. We use that for lightweight video conversations. Because we’re not all here in person sometimes, it’s important that everyone who’s on a meeting be able to see each other, and to be able to talk at balanced and equal volume so that everyone can hear each other. And to that end we also require that people have really good headsets and microphones. So much so that if you’re on a Hangout with a Palantiri, they will correct you and stop the meeting to help you tweak your audio settings so that they can hear you well. Because we have such an inclusive culture here, we want to make sure that everybody has an equal place in the conversation. And you can do that with Google Hangouts by seeing every person and hearing them. One of the other nice things about Google Hangouts and, really, many of the video chat tools now, is that it allows you to share your screen. So it’s another way to collaborate. Let’s get right to it, what are you seeing, let me see that, oh, I know what that means. It allows us to really have a much more informed conversation. Another Google tool that is crucial to our day-to-day is Google Calendars. Because everybody has a Google account, they can easily subscribe to any other Palantir team member’s [Google] Calendar. They can see where they’re at, they can schedule a meeting, they can ask them if they can move a meeting. It makes it really easy to get things scheduled, because we aren’t all here in person and can’t stop by somebody’s desk. By providing that information on demand, it makes it easier to collaborate. The last Google-related tool that I think really empowers the sharing of information and greater ability to collaborate is the Google Drive. Obviously when you use a Google Doc, a Google spreadsheet, a Google presentation, it puts it right up into the Google Drive. But the Google Drive is only as successful as it is organized. And so one of the things that we’ve done is to create a Palantir shared folder, and tried really hard to organize it so that people can easily find things. Again, that on-demand nature is important to our culture because — I don’t always know what people...

Senior Engineer Ryan Price dives into the importance of documentation in this week’s episode of the Secret Sauce. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have Senior Engineer Ryan Price talking about the importance of documentation and training. Ryan Price [RP]: My name is Ryan Price, and I want to talk a little bit today about documentation and training. Probably the key person that I think about when I get into the role of writing documentation for a project is future me. Who is the person that will be reading this later, and who is the person that’s going to get the most benefit out of it? Then I sort of go from there, because the more people that get involved with the project — whether it’s someone on the client side, whether they’re technical or non-technical, whether it’s other members of the development team, or maybe my project manager — all of those people are going to read or edit or touch the documentation of a project at some point. And on a lot of projects I’ve worked on in the past, I have been in the role of training the new people who are going to be using that project, whether it’s other developers or the content editor who’s working on the client side. And all of those people need to know what this website is supposed to be doing. Beyond just the business goals, there’s lots of nuts and bolts things, and in the land of Drupal we have lots of nuts and bolts things. And for some people those things are totally new, and they have fun new words like ‘nodes’ and ‘taxonomy’ and ‘views.’ And for other people, they know those things, but they haven’t seen this way for placing blocks in this context, whatever that happens to be. So I think even a simple project that is just a brochure site would still have documentation that needs to be written for future me. When I come back to this project, I don’t want to spend five hours remembering my motivation behind making a new field for this. It should just be there. What does this field do and why do we have it? You want to get this stuff out of your head. If you get hit by a bus, you don’t want to be the person on the project who made something that was indecipherable and everyone needs to sit around and figure it out. And the other thing is, when you explain something, you learn it. There’s doing it and being able to do it yourself, versus having to write it down. For me, translating something out of my head into speaking is when I really understand what it is that I’m doing, or writing it down at the same time. And you can also discover things about the project, too. Like discovering when a requirement is unclear, or when a piece of work is not quite polished. Because you’re getting ready to document it, and you say, it’s supposed to do these nine things and it does eight of them really well. So there are lots and lots of benefits to documenting your project and teaching someone else how to use it, and I think probably the key person among those is future me. Thank you for listening! AM: Thanks Ryan. That’s the end of this week’s Secret Sauce. For more great tips, please check out our website at Palantir.net. You can also follow us on twitter at @palantir. Have a great day!

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Palantir Founder and CEO George DeMet dives into the importance of being in tune with your company’s purpose. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick piece of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager at Palantir, and today we’re talking with our Founder, George DeMet. He’s going to share why it’s so critical to understand your company’s purpose. It sounds like a basic concept, but it’s important to give clarity around why a company exists. George DeMet [GD]: In a previous installment of the Special Sauce a couple of months ago, I talked a little bit about my personal history with family-run businesses and some of the values and principles that have helped guide some of the world’s most enduring companies. Values and principles are important because they help answer the question of how we as a company strive to interact with each other, with our customers, and with the world around us. Today, I’d like to talk about the importance of understanding your company’s purpose, or why it is that we do what we do. Being able to say what it is that gives your company direction and purpose is vital to attracting motivated employees and helping prospective customers understand why they should choose to work with you. Knowing what you do and why you do it is essential, but so is being able to communicate that vision to others. A core purpose can be articulated in many ways. If you’re a very small company, everyone on the team probably already knows and understands your core purpose, and you may not even need to articulate it. But as your company grows and evolves, chances are that not everyone will come in with that shared understanding, and you’ll need to find a succinct and understandable way to describe to others the reason why your company exists. Now the flip answer is “because getting a paycheck is what puts a roof over my head and food on my table”, but I think we can all agree that that’s not enough. There are a lot of different ways to make money, and we make a deliberate choice to do what we do. Fundamentally, a core purpose is an organization’s most fundamental reason for being. It does not change, but it inspires change. And most importantly, it must be authentic to the organization’s values and culture. Many companies have a mission statement, which is a (usually) brief and aspirational statement describing what it is that the company seeks to do. The difference between a mission statement and a vision statement is that a mission statement focuses on a company’s present state while a vision statement focuses on a company’s future. Some companies tend to blend these statements, and in most cases, that’s okay. What’s important is that there’s an easy way for people to understand what the company is about and its approach. This is usually something that appears in the company handbook or field guide, and it’s often on the website as well. To be clear, a mission statement or purpose is something that should be distinct from your tagline or marketing slogan. It’s my belief that regardless of what form it takes, a statement of purpose is not one of those things that you can just knock out in a workshop over an afternoon. It needs to come from deep inside you, and it needs to “feel” right. It’s also really important that the stated mission, vision, and values are be aligned with the actual culture of the company, or else they’re just lip service. For example, Enron advertised Communication, Respect, Integrity, and Excellence as their core values, yet the actions of their senior leadership created a culture of greed that encouraged unethical behavior at all levels, using a variety of deceptive, bewildering, and fraudulent accounting practices to make the company appear more profitable than it actually was. The company’s traders were also actively involved...

Listen to Ken Rickard (@agentrickard) discuss some exciting new developments for Workbench in Drupal 8. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hello and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a little bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have our Director of Professional Services Ken Rickard talking about the state of Workbench in Drupal 8. Ken Rickard [KR]: Hi, this is Ken Rickard, the director of professional services at Palantir. Today we’re going to talk about Workbench and the module suite that we developed as part of the Drupal 7 lifecycle. Workbench, if you don’t remember, is a series of three modules that were designed to hit very common publishing use cases. Workbench Moderation is the most popular. It provides for staging previews along an approval workflow. Workbench Access is an editorial access decision module, it lets you decide who can edit content on your worksite. Workbench itself is really just a collection of editorial views to make it easier for people to find the content they need to work on. Since our last blog post on this subject, some really fun and interesting stuff has happened in that space. In particular, if you were at DrupalCon New Orleans, you heard Dries talk about the workflow initiative in Drupal core. What’s fascinating about Drupal core right now is that we contributed a lot of code to Drupal 8 regarding how publishing workflows actually operate, and actually removed some of the barriers that made it harder to do workbench moderation. Some of those things are still there, but because we’re now following a semantic and stable release cycle, so that every six months we have a new release of Drupal that does not break backward compatibility, that means that we can add new modules to core. And there was a movement among the core maintainers — specifically I know that Alex Pott was involved, I know that Nathaniel Catchpole was involved — and they decided that they wanted to push Workbench Moderation into Drupal core in Drupal 8.2, which is the next release that’s coming up, in order to start shaking out the rest of the issues that need to be solved in core that are really specific and relevant to the workflow initiative. The workflow initiative has some really fantastic and ambitious things that are going to be happening, but for it to work properly, all content must be revisionable, and those revisions must have the capacity to be moderated. Since we had a working model of content moderation, that’s going to be brought straight into core and then iterated on. So it’s really fascinating. There are a couple of things that are important about that from our perspective. Number one, it really is a culmination of the work that we started, at this point, seven years ago, in order to make it easier for publishers to use Drupal to accomplish the tasks they need to accomplish. So that’s a huge victory for us; we’re really proud of that. Number two, it does show very good things about the product lifecycle and the maturity of Drupal as a project as Drupal 8 moves forward, this idea that says, hey, we can add new features without breaking backwards compatibility. We’re willing to experiment with things in core in order to improve the experience for our users. I think that’s really critical. So the outcomes of that, which are going to happen pretty rapidly — there’s a developer named Tim Millwood . . . Tim works for Acquia, he’s been involved with the workflow initiative since day one, he’s part of the module acceleration program, and Tim’s been around the Drupal community for quite a long time. Tim’s taking over the workbench moderation in core project, which is going to be called ‘content moderation’. He’s got a first iteration that’s almost ready to be committed into core. So while Tim’s working on the code side, there’s actually part of the Drupal UX team approaching, how does workflow...

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Senior Designer Ashley Cyborski discusses our iterative design feedback process and how this helps move designs forward to effectively meet our clients’ ideal results. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a short piece of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today we’re talking with Ashley Cyborski about a good design iteration and feedback process. Ashley Cyborski [AC]: Hi everyone, My name is Ashley Cyborski and I’m a senior web designer here at Palantir. You may remember my other podcast about the benefits of designing in the browser. You should check that one out if you’re a web designer feeling hesitant about taking the leap to HTML and CSS. Today, though, I want to talk about our design feedback process here at Palantir, because it is a bit different than traditional design processes. I’d like to rewind and give you a bit of background. At Palantir we use agile methodologies during our development process. For anyone unfamiliar, agile is a 2 week cycle called a sprint where you prioritize work, complete those tasks, present the work to the client, and receive feedback which you can then incorporate into the next sprint. It is a process of continual improvement and collaboration. Our design feedback process came out of a desire to incorporate that same level of collaboration and continual improvement into the design phases of a project. After a lot of thinking, and quite a bit of inspiration from a webinar by Dan Mall, we came up with a process that is iterative, but accommodates our clients’ needs. The process isn’t perfect and we are continually working to improve it, but it is a huge improvement from where we were just two years ago. The core principle of our design feedback process is iteration. Though this sounds pretty obvious, it is very different than the traditional design feedback and iteration cycle. In a traditional process you present your work, receive feedback, incorporate that feedback into the design that you had presented, and then re-present your work, around and around until the client decides to approve the design. And though that works quite well for print design, it is counter intuitive to web design, especially when paired with an iterative development process. In our feedback process we often tell our clients to think about moving designs forward. At the start, we present 2 to 4 style tiles to the client. Then, we ask them to choose the “most correct” one to move forward with. The one they chose may not be perfect yet, but through iteration and with the proper input, we move the design closer and closer to that “ideal”. In order to get there, we need that input. We ask our clients to provide feedback on the chosen style tile and the discarded ones. We prompt with questions like “What did you like about this design?”, “What don’t you like about this design?”, and most importantly, “Why?” Our goal is to understand our client’s thoughts and feelings, including what is inspiring them and what is concerning them. We take all that feedback and the selected direction, and begin on the first static comp. We don’t spend our time iterating on the selected style tile. At this point we repeat the process with static comps. The feedback received during the comp phase is worked into the prototype. From there on out, the prototyping process syncs up with the sprint cycle, and feedback on prototypes is defined and prioritized along with the remaining design tasks and incorporated on a sprint by sprint basis. That was a lot of words to describe how we move the design process forward. You might ask, why don’t we work on one deliverable until it is “perfect” or close to perfect? Well there are a few driving factors. First, our process becomes faster and more efficient because we don’t...

On this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Joe Allen-Black and Luke Wertz explain how Project Stewards use a collaborative process to help our team fully understand and meet our clients’ business objectives and goals. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we’re talking about Project Stewardship with Joe Allen-Black and Luke Wertz. Luke Wertz [LW]: Hello, I am Luke Wertz. I am an senior engineer and a team lead here at Palantir. Joe Allen-Black [JAB]: Hi, I’m Joe Allen-Black. I’m a project manager and a strategist here at Palantir. LW: So today we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about this concept of project stewards that we have here at Palantir. When we’re planning out a project and planning for a project’s success, one of the first things that we do is try to identify individuals within our project team who will be responsible for ensuring a project’s long-term success, from the very beginning all the way through completion of the project. JAB: What we want to make sure is that the success is defined not only by the fact that the website does everything that they hope and want it to do, and we’re able to feel great about the work that we can do, but we also want to be sure that we’re doing it within the budget constraints, within the time constraints, within whatever kinds of issues happen to be coming in — we want to make sure that we’re making the best site for all the different situations that we have. LW: Yeah, exactly. We have come to this point of trying to identify two people to do this, from a long history of only having one person that tried to embody this from the beginning of a project to the end. And that person ended up going through some unusual changes during the course of a project, needing to wear many different hats: the business analyst hat, sometimes just having to refer to that person as an analyst, sometimes as an architect, sometimes as a technical lead, sometimes as a team lead — it got to be a bit much. And it was oftentimes difficult to transition well from the strategic planning parts of a project, that typically happen quickly very early on, and then into architecture and technical implementation. So we identified that this need arose to have two people playing this part on a project, and to work as a balance and counterbalance for each other. JAB: What we’re ultimately trying to do is make sure that throughout the process our clients understand why we’re coming up with solutions, why we’re coming up with suggestions, as to how we can best work with them. And during the types of projects that Luke and I are on, part of my role would be to go through and determine some of the different features, some of the different ideas that we want to have the site include. And then, working with Luke, I’ll try to help facilitate the best way we can implement those in maybe the best order for those. The technical side is left to smarter folks like Luke to figure out, obviously. And then we try to make sure that together that the options are the highest-quality technical answer that fits within the constraints we have on the project. LW: That’s exactly right. We spend a lot of time talking about what our client’s business objectives are, and their goals. And where I really rely on somebody like JAB, or somebody in JAB’s position, is to really have a deep understanding of the client’s KPIs and what those might look like in practice. And having somebody who is a co-worker and colleague who does that, and not being reliant on a client stakeholder to do that for me — it allows me to workshop ideas and to architect these incredibly huge, sometimes overly complex — some might be so bold to say, over-engineered solutions, and have a friendly face telling me, nope, go try again. JAB: It’s friendly...

On this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, we are joined by guests Kirsten Burgard and James King, organizers of Drupal GovCon. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager, and today we have a different Secret Sauce. Ken Rickard, our Director of Professional Services, recently attending Drupal GovCon in Washington DC in July, and got to sit down with two of the organizers: James King from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Kirsten Burgard from the US Department of State to chat about this annual Drupal event. So they are going to share what this event is about, and why you may want to check it out next year. All right! Take it away Ken . . . Ken Rickard [KR]: This is Ken Rickard. We’re at the Palantir Secret Sauce podcast. This is our broadcast from Drupal GovCon, and we’ve invited two of the organizers to join us today: we’re with Kirsten Burgard and James King. Kirsten Burgard [KB]: Yay! Welcome to Drupal GovCon. KR: Thank you. This is I think my third or fourth . . . it used to be Capital Camp, and it’s now GovCon. This is the second year I’ve been here at the NIH, I know that. So tell me, how did the two of you get involved in this event? KB: Well, it started . . . this is all really Tim Wood’s fault. He’s at the Department of Commerce. And he thought it would be really great if we all got together and started to do events, mini events where we could share information. The very first event one we did we had thirteen people. Then we decided to hold a larger event as a government-focused one at Commerce, and that was 2012. KR: Yes, I was there, KB: Yeah, we killed the wifi before 8:00 in the morning [laughs]. I had never seen that before. We thought we’d get about 200 people. We had 330. And at that event James approached me and said, “Hey, what about NIH hosting it?” And I thought, ‘this is never going to happen. Who at NIH is really going to make this happen?’ And it’s been James for three years now. James King [JK]: So I did go to the Commerce event, and I had started using Drupal since 2010. When I got hired here in 2009, they gave me a project that hadn’t been started, and they bought this thing called Drupal and had a server, and I knew nothing about Drupal so I was learning on my feet Drupal 6. And I started playing with it and really liked it, and wanted to learn more about it. Found out about the Commerce event and that, like what was there, but saw how cramped it was. KB: [Laughs] JK: And wanted to get involved, and also selfishly wanted to be able to get more exposure at NIH on Drupal. I work for the NIH Library . . . the internal research library for NIH . . . and one of the things that we’re trying to do is foster community in different areas. And since I have a technology background, I’m trying to encourage use of technology across NIH. And Drupal being one of the things we’re working on, we were trying to encourage more people to know about and use Drupal. So it made sense to at least try to have an event at our place. Since then obviously this has continued to grow, and we now have user group meetings as well just for NIH people. And those are growing as well. KR: Yeah, the GovCon is a little bit of a special event of all the ones that I go to. Most of the ones that I go to are regionally-themed, but this one is industry-themed, or in this case, government service. KB: Yeah. KR: Public service themed. So, I mean, what are the goals of the whole idea? What are we trying to accomplish here? KB: Well when we started doing DrupalGov . . . it’s actually called Drupal For Gov . . . we really just wanted to make it possible for government practitioners in open source communities to get together. Drupal just had the largest influx of folks within government. We also have Linux...

In this week’s episode of The Secret Sauce, Director of Professional Services Ken Rickard gives an overview of his upcoming webinar that outlines the components that go into successful web projects. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run a little bit better. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here, and today’s advice comes from our Director of Professional Services, Ken Rickard. He has some thoughts on why web projects succeed: how to do proper planning and how to consider all the components of a project. A heads-up that he talks about a webinar he’s hosting on this very topic on Wednesday July 27th, but in reality we moved it to Thursday July 28th (the next day)! So be sure to join our mailing list on our website at Palantir.net, or email me at manley@palantir.net to get the information and get the link forwarded your way. All right! On to Ken . . . Ken Rickard [KR]: Hi I’m Ken Rickard, I’m the Director of Professional Services at Palantir.net, and on the 27th of July [NOTE: moved to the 28th of July] I’ll be doing a webinar called “How Web Projects Succeed” in which we’ll take a look at how you plan, and then later execute, a project from end-to-end. And we’ll be looking at specifically all the different components that you need to be thinking about in terms of strategy and budget while you’re planning to do your next project. So what we like to do is walk through all the necessary steps that are required in order to really get a firm grasp on the goals of the project: how you’re going to measure your success towards those goals, how you’re going to articulate those goals to your internal stakeholders, we’ll talk about how you develop personas and other understandings of your audience, how you use those to inform your design, and use those again to do some testing around those designs to make sure you have good information architecture. We’ll talk about content, in particular we’ll talk about content audits and content strategy, so that you understand how your message gets across in terms of your CMS architecture, but also workflow and all the other little bits and pieces that go into making a successful editorial experience. So what I think you’ll find for people who don’t do . . . who aren’t in a web firm like ours who do dozens of projects in a year . . . you’ll find there are lots of little nuances and details that if you’re not planning for them, they will catch you by surprise. And if you’re not prepared for those surprised, you’re going to have a difficult time adjusting as the project moves on. It’s a fairly informal talk, but we do drill into, “here are the things we know are going to happen, here’s what we advise are best practices, and here’s how you ought to be budgeting for things.” A good example would be if you’re not budgeting for quality assurance testing, what are you going to be missing out on? If you’re not budgeting for long-term support . . . it’s fascinating the number of people we run into who have a budget for getting a new site designed, but then have no budget for Year 2 or Year 3, thinking, “well once we do this, it will be done.” And that’s just not the way the web works! We’ve all been doing this for a very long time, and understand that the web is a dynamic medium, and the thing you just finished isn’t complete. There are just waypoints along the road of sort of ongoing marketing and development and things like that. So you are always in a position to want to make changes. You’re always in a position to want to publish new things. And in order to do that, you need a long-term maintenance strategy. It’s interesting . . . I was talking to a client recently, and we had a very long conversation about how we could help them on their project. And it was interesting to me because I think they were looking for a technical answer. They were expecting me...

Web projects are a lot to manage, and that fact doesn’t change after launch. A dedicated support team can help keep things running smoothly and securely. Client Success Manager Cynthia Philpot goes over all of the services our support team can provide to make sure your project is a success, no matter the size. TRANSCRIPT Allison Manley [AM]: Hi again everyone, and welcome to The Secret Sauce, a short podcast by Palantir.net, that offers a quick bit of advice to help your business run smoother. I’m Allison Manley, an Account Manager here at Palantir, and today’s advice comes from Cynthia Philpot, our Client Success Manager. Cynthia handles support for our clients, which is such a critical component of any website. Because once a site is finished, it still needs continuous maintenance and upgrades. She will be talking about the support services that we offer here at Palantir and how we can assist with your support needs. Cynthia Philpot [CP]: Hey Allison! Among the many other services that Palantir.net has to offer — like web strategy, consulting, designing and building some very cool websites, we offer ongoing client support. Whether you are transitioning into our Support department from an ongoing Palantir project, or if you are looking for an experienced company to support your existing website, we can address your needs. As the Client Success Manager here at Palantir, I am the ongoing point of contact for all of our customers in Support. Based on a relationship built on trust we interact on a regular basis to ensure enhancements, features, and other project needs are addressed. The services that we provide in support are many. We like to begin with a site audit. The site audit is essentially a snapshot of your site. We do a technical review of the site, looking at things like the architecture, build, security — just to name a few. We then provide you with an audit report and walk you through the site findings. We provide information and recommend solutions about any urgent needs that we uncover and make short and long term recommendations to provide a roadmap for next steps. We can do the work for you if you like, or we can do a consulting or training engagement should you decide to do the work yourself. This is really beneficial for a number of reasons for a variety of different people based on their individual skill set levels and desired outcomes. You will have unlimited access to our ticketing system, which our support team will monitor, evaluate, and use to respond to your requests. Be it a bug-fix, issue, or question, we will assign an experienced engineer to provide one-on-one assistance and work with you until the request is resolved. We do security updates because keeping your site secure is at the top of our list. We check weekly for any security updates that may affect your site, and we’ll keep you informed on the progress and ensure the update is done in an expedient manner. We can maintain a standing relationship with your hosting provider. So based on your specific issue and provided we have access, we gladly manage the relationship between you and your hosting provider on your behalf. We have standing relationships with most of the largest providers, and can assist in providing clarity when you receive important notifications and alerts. I mentioned earlier that we perform a site audit but we also provide a Google Analytics audit to identify proper tagging, custom event tracking, goals, conversions, and any other customizations aside from a basic install. As I mentioned early on, whether you need assistance maintaining a current site or perhaps needing to onboard a new employee, we can provide training to fit your specific needs. Palantir provides training and consulting in a variety of formats. Teaching is an integral part of our work. We provide support for Drupal sites as well as other types of sites like WordPress too. If there are additional questions, I am available to provide answers and...

Intro: Welcome to the latest episode of On the Air with Palantir, a long-form podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. In this episode, Account Manager Allison Manley is joined by Palantir CEOs George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss. TRANSCRIPT: Allison Manley [AM]: Welcome to On the Air with Palantir, a podcast by Palantir.net where we go in-depth on topics related to the business of web design and development. It’s July 2016 and this is episode #6. This is a special edition really, since this year marks the 20th anniversary of Palantir. It’s hard to fathom considering the internet was still very new in 1996, so there are very few web shops that have been around this long. Palantir started as a development agency, then over time added services such as design and strategy, to become the full, well-rounded, end to end company that it is today. So we are celebrating our 20th anniversary later this month. I sat down with owners George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss to talk about how Palantir started, how it developed into the company it is today, and where we’re headed. AM: Hello, Tiffany and George! How are you doing today? George DeMet [GD]: We’re doing well. Tiffany Farriss [TF]: Hi, Allison! AM: Thanks for talking with me, I appreciate it. So we’re going to talk about the 20 years of Palantir. It’s hard to believe, right? GD: It’s…yeah [laughs]. I’ve never really known anything else, it’s kind of funny. AM: You’ve never had another job? GD: That’s not true. I worked for my parents when I was in high school. They ran a disposal and recycling company. So I did have experience growing up driving a garbage truck and managing a recycling center. TF: This wasn’t what I was going to do, but it is pretty much the only thing I’ve done. Other than having a NASA research grant as an undergrad, this is it. AM: What were you going to do? I’m curious. TF: I was going to go to grad school in astrophysics. That was my thing. I really wanted to do astrophysics, and I really liked cosmology in particular. I wanted to study the origins of the universe. AM: Which we’re kind of doing [laughs]. So let’s have a quick overview of Palantir’s history. How did Palantir begin? GD: So I actually started Palantir back in the summer of ’96, which was between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had discovered the Web back in the fall of ’94 when I was a freshman, and had really been kind of fascinated by it. It was very new – Netscape was still in beta at that point, and I was just really captivated by this idea of having pretty much anyone in the world being able to publish content that pretty much anyone else anywhere in the world would be able to read and access and view. I thought that was kind of revolutionary and I could see that this was the start of something kind of interesting, and I wanted to be a part of it. And so I started making some web pages, just sort of as a hobby. I made a fan page for ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ that is still around today, after 22 years. And then I discovered that folks would pay me money to build websites and web pages. So after doing this freelance for a while, I decided it was a good idea to start a company around it. TF: Because that’s what your family does [laughs]. GD: So that’s probably a little bit of helpful background. Both sides of my family are a couple of generations of people who started and ran family businesses. I mentioned that my parents have a disposal company. My mom’s father had a couple of grocery stores in Leavenworth, Kansas. My dad’s family ran the DeMet candy company, the folks that brought you the chocolate Turtle. So that was really kind of all I knew, right? Working for someone else was really not part of my DNA. So I knew I was going to do something, and when the web came along, it seemed like this was definitely something I wanted to do. TF: For me, I started on the web...